ComfortComes

Metric – Fantasies

It’s been nearly four years since Canada’s new wave band Metric put out their last studio album, the guys put out their first single from Fantasies at the end of last year entitled Help I’m Still Alive which has ended up as the opening track. It’s proved popular amongst Canadian radio DJs and works well the album’s opener, it’s an atmospheric song that keeps building and building and changing as it progresses. The lyrics such as “my heart’s still beating like a hammer” aren’t particularly revolutionary and yet they still manage to sound fresh in the way that Emily Haines sings them. The second track sees the album changing into full pop mode, with the incredibly catchy guitar based Sick Muse. There are a few weak tracks but overall this is a fairly cohesive album, with moments of genius, highlights include the pre-mentioned tracks, Gimme Sympathy and Stadium Love.

Apparently Fantasies started life as an acoustic jam session coupled with some surreal lyrical ideas about random animals fighting each other, Haine’s claims she saw the sentence “Spider Vs Bat” written on the wall of the studio which conjured up images in her head such as, and I quote “a swan pecking the shit out of an elephant and pigs biting the necks out of tigers”. A lot of the songs on the album have been thoroughly road tested so if you’ve seen the band live over the past few years then you may well recognise a few tracks that have made the final grade, Metric are back on tour in May with twelve dates planned so far around Europe.

Fantasies is definitely worth checking out, along with some of the acoustic versions of tracks that are currently doing the Internet rounds at the moment, a sparse cut down version of Help I’m Alive is available from the official site www.ILoveMetric.com.